“The Brave and Strong Survive, Child”

One of the best things about teaching is that it involves surrounding yourself with people who are young and talented, and you go to sleep each night hopeful that one of them, whose path you perhaps had the privilege of steadying somewhere along the way, will later see something that you and others who have come before were blind to. At the very least, these young people remind you of the necessities: the majesty of hope, the value of proper hydration, the need for good art. A couple of days ago, I was driving to the train station near the college where I work when I heard one of my students playing songs on the campus radio station. “I do not know tomorrow, only today,” a woman teased and taunted. She wasn’t quite singing in the conventional sense; it was more like she was throwing her voice against a shifting backdrop of ecstatic, wailing synths. It was messy and bewitching, brutal and brittle at once. Her voice sounded like the guide to somewhere I wanted to go. I sent the student a quick message asking him what it was. The Giant Claw remix of Guerilla Toss’s “Grass Shack,” he told me.

People sharing admiration for something in common: I sat in my car and wondered if this wasn’t where all political feelings begin. Or maybe that was just the melodrama shading all of our actions right now, whether your candidate won or lost, as we try to resume normal life in the hyper-aware state that someday someone will ask what it was like to live through this week.

What’s the point of listening to music during a moment that seems so fraught? In the shadow of all the material changes that might soon come, talking about culture can feel like a waste of time, a momentary distraction on the way to a total despondency. But American music is a chronicle of joy and pain, a version of the past that floats alongside official history. There are moments when a song captures our present with prophetic clarity and others when it shines just out of reach, or takes us lower than we thought possible. And if the election of Donald Trump demonstrated anything, it’s that we should never underestimate the unpredictable rhythms of culture, the possibility that a random utterance or an empty boast might coalesce into a movement. He did nothing less than remap the borders of the American imagination.

I’ve thought about this a lot in the past few months—all the debates convened in the name of “culture,” the political fractures subsumed within questions of taste or preference. The supposed scourge of political correctness, and the coalitions comprising fans of “Duck Dynasty” who felt the show was hard done by. The premise, floated by the TV executive Les Moonves, that Trump might be bad for America but was “good for CBS.” The reality that our President-elect is legitimately skillful at Twitter and that his celebrity “normalized” him. It’s one of the lessons of the Trump campaign that culture is unstable and uncontainable, and that you simply never know whether something released into the world—a song, a meme, a fake headline—will take on a life of its own.

Maybe this sense of every moment becoming pregnant with possibility is why I found myself turning to music, these past few months, for escape. A lot of the music that was explicitly attuned to the weird frequencies of this election cycle left me cold. In October, the Web site “30 Days, 30 Songs” was launched, with artists like R.E.M., Moby, Ani DiFranco, and Death Cab for Cutie contributing songs about Trump’s demagoguery, instability, and inexperience. There were other songs that vied to be anthems: Le Tigre’s clunky, pro-Clinton anthem “I’m with Her”; YG and Nipsey Hussle’s joyfully blunt “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump).” The problem for me was that a lot of this music—YG excepted—tended toward compassion and civility, giving the other side the benefit of the doubt, hopeful that the truth might set them free. But it’s hard to defeat rule-breaking charisma with reason or performative acts of hate-trumping love. Or maybe that song remains to be written.

Instead, I sought out music that seemed to arrive from an alternate universe—from a future America I wanted to be a part of. Yves Tumor’s “Serpent Music,” misty and bluesy; Frankie Reyes’s “Boleros Valses y Mas,” a set of traditional Latin-American boleros delightfully played through an analogue synthesizer; Helado Negro’s “Private Energy,” an electronic excursion into what it means to be “young, Latin, and proud.” I immersed myself in the composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s blissed-out “EARS,” and I partook in the modest comfort of “Evn,” an EP of gorgeous beats and ambient sketches that the producer VHVL made while recovering from a botched surgery. This is an arbitrary list, not necessarily meant to soothe or inspire. But we find the raw materials for the new world where we can, even in sound.

Before heading to bed on Tuesday night, I began randomly clicking on YouTube, and I ended up listening to Sly and the Family Stone’s “Brave and Strong,” a sprawling jam that slowly nudges toward uplift. A track from the band’s deflated funk masterpiece “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” from 1971, it was a reminder of a previous generation’s moment of crisis, one that resounds into our present. “The brave and strong survive, child,” Sly sings, and I had to believe that this was true—that he once believed these words so that I could believe them today. That it’s still imperative to imagine something higher, far past current realities, and that it’s in the willingness to start somewhere fearless and naïve that change begins. It’s a place I’d like to be.

Hua Hsu began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014, and became a staff writer in 2017.